> I have been looking at OpenOffice to see what they do. I have just
> looked a little bit, and since I'm pretty ignorant on office apps,
> haven't found much, apart from the 'Data sources' dialog.

/me looks for tutorial on Data Sources, as he doesn't have OO

>
> What people use this dialog for?

Ahh. Ever use Windows? It's kind of an embedded Access. You can use any old database for any number of reasons, even as Joe Sixpack. The example I see is showing a contacts kind of list, a "little black book" if you will (but no stars next to the names to tell you how good the night was).

In answer to the question...view, edit, extract and store data (wasn't that just a bit obvious?)

>
> That is, what do they want the data from the database for?

I'd suppose that depends on what data you were using. Let's pretend were at AW2.2 and we have all the scripting macro-powers we like to pretend are out there from time to time. If I wanted to send a business letter to Hank Hill about an anticipated need of more propane due to a party or some such, I might just pop up the command plugin, and start "memo: business: Hill, Hank". Gypsython pops up, formats the page properly and then extracts Hank's contact information via GDA, which will grab his contact information from my Business_Contacts table on my MySQL server.